From the Archives

Chelsea Clinton’s Oxford Whirl

From Arkansas to Oxford, Chelsea Clinton had a front-row seat to the political (and personal) wins and losses of her parents. Nancy Jo Sales explored Chelsea’s coming of age in the years after her father left the White House in *Vanity Fair’*s June 2002 issue.

It was “Cheesy Listening” night at the Zodiac club in Oxford, and all
the Sloanes were there. The Sloanes—so named for their resemblance to
an affected set in London in the 80s—are the girls who run the Oxford
University social scene, or at least think they do, because they are
pretty and blonde and have families with vacation homes in places like
Ibiza, which they pronounce “Ih-bee-tha.” They can easily be spotted
by their pink pashminas.

There was another girl there that night—this was the fall of 2001,
just after classes had begun for the year. The girl was not blonde, but
her parents were two of the most powerful people in the world. She stood
on the sideline watching her new classmates dance. It was a position she
was unused to. She had spent most of her life at the center of things.
She was Chelsea Clinton, and she wanted to get out on the dance floor.

She loved to dance. As a child, she had performed in The Nutcracker
with the Washington School of Ballet. A wire service had declared her
performance “graceful”; a president had sat in the audience, cheering
her on. In North Africa, on a state visit, accompanying a First Lady,
she had danced with the Bedouins, and a national magazine had commented
on her spirited “leaping and shimmying.”

But here in Oxford the students seemed to be taking perverse delight in
simply ignoring her, or maybe it was the presence of the two Secret
Service men, posted nearby, that dissuaded anyone from asking her to go
for a whirl. She watched as the Sloanes and their dates boogied down to
the sounds of “Lady Marmalade” and “Stayin’ Alive.” American music,
her music.

And then Chelsea decided to take matters into her own hands. She spotted
a handsome boy in the crowd and let one of her guards know she would
like to dance with him. The Secret Service man dutifully approached the
boy, and Chelsea danced.

“It was a bit odd,” one of the boy’s friends said later, “because it
was so sort of ‘Your presence is requested’ kind of thing . . . as if he
were being taken in front of the Queen.”

In the months since that lonely night in Oxford, Chelsea Clinton has
indeed emerged as a kind of queen—a media queen. She was once known as
a plain, studious girl given to wearing slogan T-shirts (DON’T LET THE
FUTURE HAPPEN WITHOUT YOU was a favorite), but now her public image has
been treated to the sort of glamour infusion publicists only dream about
while delirious with fever.

The crowning moment came in January, when Chelsea turned up sitting in
the front row of a Donatella Versace couture show in Paris next to
Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna—the unlikeliest paparazzi shot to come
along in years. Her usual Banana Republic cast aside for a black Versace
pantsuit, Chelsea was beautiful. Her curly hair had been straightened in
a Versace-masterminded pageboy almost universally deemed to be
transforming. “I am a bit dazzled by it all,” Chelsea said, in between
attempts to share observations with Paltrow.

But if the glare of the spotlight bothered her, Chelsea didn’t let on.
In March, she jetted to Milan for Versace’s ready-to-wear show, this
time hobnobbing with Heather Graham. As she sat watching the models,
Chelsea’s hand rested on the thigh of her boyfriend, a mop-headed
American Rhodes scholar at Oxford named Ian Klaus. The couple’s “dirty
dancing” antics at the after-party prompted the New York Daily News to
remark, “Chelsea Clinton has inherited her father’s lust gene.”

“The press is still all over me in London, but on the Continent I can
do what I want,” Chelsea told Woman’s Wear Daily. Since then, the
passionate pair’s P.D.A.’s have become shark bait for tabloids all over
the world. “I’ve been very good to you,” Chelsea recently told a busy
Oxford paparazzo named Clive Postlethwaite, playfully slapping his hand.
“I try not to thrust Ian into the limelight,” Chelsea told reporters
at the London premiere of The Shipping News, going on to say she would
have preferred to be in Oxford, studying, but she felt she had to come
“because of Kevin”—Spacey. The British papers have faithfully
covered Chelsea’s nearly weekly outings in the company of celebrities
such as Paul McCartney and his fiancée, Heather Mills, Bianca Jagger,
and model Sophie Dahl. Chelsea has been taken under the wing of society
mavens Sally Greene, head of the Old Vic theater, and Nicky Haslam, a
sexagenarian man-about-town known for his spiky hair and leather pants.
Tatler magazine voted Chelsea the fifth-most-eligible young woman in
Britain, while the British men’s magazine FHM ranked her one of the 50
most eligible in the world, along with Oprah Winfrey.

A makeover, an internationally tracked love affair—now all that was
needed was the whiff of scandal to make Chelsea’s refitted celebrity
complete, SWAY TO GO, CHELSEA, said the News of the World in December,
with shots of a red-faced Chelsea apparently stumbling from a car and
having to be held up by friends. It was a memorable night in London,
with her father in town for the holidays. They had taken 15 guests and
16 bodyguards out to Conrad Gallagher’s restaurant, where they
reportedly rang up a £9,000 bill. Then it was on to the Groucho Club, a
private bar for the literary and show-business elite, where pal Bono of
U2 played the piano for Bill.

“It’s a Henry James story,” says one student about Chelsea’s time at
Oxford.

“Bill had tea with lemon,” says a Groucho Club waiter. “Bono was
having pink champagne. Bill was going around offering to sign autographs
and pose for photographs. He said, ‘Would you like a picture with
me?’ ”

In April, the supermarket tabloid the Globe tried to cause a stir with
the headline CHELSEA ELOPES—but the cover photo would have been
enough. Again there was Chelsea—or rather there was her tongue,
springing into the mouth of Ian Klaus, in telephoto detail.

That shot, taken on a trip to Venice, can’t be the kind of thing the
Clintons envision as an ideal image for the daughter they always tried
to portray as the epitome of a proper young lady—serious, smart, once
the personal counselee of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. (When contacted
for this article, the Clintons said that as a matter of policy they do
not comment on Chelsea.)

But Chelsea is clearly no longer controlled by her parents. The stream
of steamy photographs has done what no one would have thought possible
years ago, when Chelsea was a girl with braces in billowing Laura Ashley
dresses: Chelsea Clinton has become a sex symbol. She’s the new J.F.K.
Jr.

When Chelsea was a little girl, her father, then governor of Arkansas,
kept a small desk in his office where she could do her “work.” In the
age of baby-boomer parenting, lots of dads like to include their
children in the workplace, but probably none with as heightened a sense
of images as Bill Clinton. As a 16-year-old boy who already knew he
wanted to be president, Bill made sure to have his photograph taken with
President John F. Kennedy on a trip, with the Boys Nation group, to the
Rose Garden in 1963—an image he would use to his political advantage
later. He no doubt became aware of another shot, snapped that same year,
of Kennedy with his son, John junior, scrambling beneath his desk in the
Oval Office.

If Chelsea Clinton thinks of herself as a political legacy, it’s no
wonder. She has watched her mother go from First Lady to senator of New
York amid speculation that Hillary Clinton will one day run for
president. “Most presidents’ children—they sink like stones once
their parent leaves office,” says Gil Troy, a presidential historian.
“But this is a different age.” A president’s son currently occupies
the White House; there are more women in the Senate than ever
before—13. If the timing isn’t right for Hillary, it just may be for
Chelsea.

It was her mother who first compared their family to the Kennedys, in
her 1996 best-seller, It Takes a Village. Just prior to moving into the
White House, Hillary said, she spent time with Jacqueline Kennedy
Onassis, who offered advice on being the parent of a president’s
daughter. “She stressed the importance of giving children as normal a
life as possible,” Hillary wrote, “of granting them the chance to
fight their private battles while protecting them from public
exposure.”

In the book, a tract on children’s issues, Hillary can be seen as a sort
of sagacious mother figure in the communal Village, using many examples
from the life of Chelsea to illustrate healthy methods of child rearing.
The most vivid is one in which Bill hurls insults about himself to
six-year-old Chelsea at the dinner table, so that the little girl can
gain “mastery over her emotions” before encountering attacks on her
father during his second campaign for governor of Arkansas.

“She was always obviously very interested in what her parents were
doing and in global issues that the president was wrestling with,” says
P. J. Crowley, former national-security spokesman. At 15, Chelsea
surprised her father by asking for a ticket to his State of the Union
address. “She certainly is interested in the substance of politics,”
says former health secretary Donna Shalala.

Particularly in his last year in the White House, Bill Clinton seemed to
be rather openly grooming his daughter for a career in
politics—something perhaps encouraged by Chelsea herself. In March of
2000, she traveled with the president on a tour of Southeast Asia. That
September he sent her as an official U.S. representative to the 2000
Olympic Games in Sydney. At the Olympics, the press—which for eight
years had essentially honored the Clintons’ insistence on Chelsea’s
privacy—began to chafe when the First Daughter continued to refuse to
answer even the blandest sort of questions. (Do you like the Opera
House? “I think we all love the Opera House,” interjected Shalala, her
traveling companion.) “This is all getting weird,” said The Washington
Post, adding that the Games were “financed with taxpayer dollars . . .
so couldn’t she do more than stand there and smile?”

The sudden presence of Chelsea in a quasi-official position next to her
father was attributed to the post-Monicagate chill between Bill and
Hillary, who was now busy campaigning for senator of New York. In the
fall of 2000, Chelsea took a semester off from school to campaign
alongside her mother. Although she was veritably mute throughout the
many stops around New York State, Chelsea’s presence proved winning. The
New York Times described her as a “quiet political force”—as always
a support in Hillary’s ongoing effort to portray herself as a warm human
being.

In 1999, Bill included Chelsea at the table at Camp David for peace
talks between Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime
minister Ehud Barak. The Israeli delegation reportedly complained to the
president, asking what she was doing there.

When the world changed forever on September 11, so did the world of
Chelsea Clinton. In the wake of the disaster, the so-called Greta Garbo
of American politics spoke in the December issue of the now defunct Talk
magazine.

While the fact of the piece was widely noted by the press, the actual
content went largely uncommented on. No one picked up on Chelsea’s
emotional announcement that she was running for president—or something
like it, someday.

“Before and After”—billed as a memoir of Chelsea’s day in New York
on the day the planes hit—reads like a coming-of-age story, an
Oprahesque attempt to deal with feelings about terrorism’s coming to
America’s shores, and a campaign speech, all rolled into one. It’s very
Clintonian.

“I don’t know very much these days,” Chelsea wrote. “Before September
11 I wouldn’t have believed I had many innocences left. . . . I had
mourned with the victims of the USS Cole, seen lives devastated by
floods in the Midwest and wrecked by earthquakes in Turkey . . .”

This melancholy “I,” who never mentions the name of her famous mother
and father, takes it for granted that we know which compassionate,
globe-trotting public figure we are hearing from. But if we think we
know her, she is clearly out to frame a new image. There are many
electable Chelseas in the piece.

There is Chelsea, girl of the people: after seeing the news on
television, Chelsea said, she ran into the streets (she was in town
visiting a friend), where she became one of the tens of thousands of New
Yorkers who feared they were running for their lives. “I was expounding
on the detriments of Bush’s tax cut as we approached Grand Central
Terminal and were met with hordes of people running out of the station .
. .”

There is Chelsea, champion of the September dead: days after the
attacks, Chelsea said, she and her father “walked around and listened
to people’s stories,” during which she started giving interviews, in
order to let grieving relatives “stand behind me so that the cameras
might light on their loved ones’ pictures.” There is Chelsea, a devoted
daughter: “As he always does, my father made me extremely proud.” She
is a Christian (“I prayed for my country and my city”), a New Yorker
(“I expect now that I’ll always be one”), and a friend to the Jews
(“That Monday I went to Rosh Hashanah services with family friends . .
.”).

There is Chelsea, a patriot (“Should I quit [school] and
enlist?”), a liberal (“I realize that not all Americans feel the way I
do about our current engagement in Afghanistan”), and a closet
conservative (“That day Giuliani became my captain”).

There is Chelsea, the woman—“I am not immune to loneliness”—and a
young lady who knows her fashion. To escape harm’s way, she said, she
and her friends headed up Madison Avenue. “After all,” she asked,
“how would blowing up a Roberto Cavalli store resonate across America,
much less the world?”

And, finally, there was Chelsea, a future leader of her generation: “I
. . . feel a new urgency to play a part in America’s future. I do not
know where my life will take me. . . . What I do know is that I will
somehow serve my country.”

With that statement, she stuck her flag in the memory of September 11.
It was reminiscent of a speech made 32 years earlier by a Wellesley
senior, Hillary Rodham. Hillary’s commencement address to her graduating
class was seen as a statement of purpose for her generation (and was, by
contrast, anti-war). It got Hillary’s picture in Life magazine. She
arrived at Yale Law School already known as a leader.

“One false note to me [in Chelsea’s piece] was the part about
running with the crowds in the smoky haze of that awful day and
ruminating about the tax cut,” says Howard Kurtz, media writer for The
Washington Post. “It had a level of political calculation reminiscent
of her parents.”

Chelsea Victoria Clinton was born on February 27, 1980, in Little Rock,
not Hope like her father.

She was named, as has often been said, for the Joni Mitchell song
“Chelsea Morning.” Her father was overwhelmed with emotion holding the
baby for the first time; he had never known his own father, William
Jefferson Blythe III, who had been killed in a car accident in 1946,
three months before he was born. By the time of Chelsea’s arrival,
tensions were already surfacing in the Clinton marriage. In his 1995
Clinton biography, First in His Class, David Maraniss writes of how a
longtime Clinton friend saw the future president singing his
one-year-old daughter a lullaby, substituting the lyrics “I want a
div-or-or-or-orce. I want a div-or-or-or-orce.”

Chelsea’s first home was the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock; at 32
her father was the youngest governor in Arkansas history. After he was
voted out in 1981, she spent the only two years of her life (until now)
in a private house, owned by the Clintons. This was apparently another
dark period in their marriage, with Bill depressed and working as a
lawyer while trying to get re-elected. He did, and in 1983 the Comeback
Kid and his family packed up and moved back into the mansion.

Chelsea’s mother was by then a high-powered attorney with the Rose Law
Firm and the breadwinner in the family (Bill’s salary as governor was
$35,000 a year). Chelsea was looked after by “a ready-made village of
adults who were willing to pinch-hit when I needed extra help,” Hillary
wrote in It Takes a Village, stressing that her attentiveness to every
detail of her daughter’s life was unwavering. She refused, for example,
to allow Chelsea to wear Velcro-fastened shoes—a gift from Chelsea’s
fun-loving, racetrack-going paternal grandma, Virginia Kelley (whom, in
Kelley’s youthful photographs, Chelsea resembles most of all)—because
it would prevent her from learning how to tie her laces. But there were
signs that Hillary, like many modern moms, found juggling work and
motherhood taxing. On a 1987 business trip, she was overheard snapping
on the phone, “Well, I don’t know, Bill. Did you feel her forehead? I
don’t know if she has a fever. I’m in Chicago.”

Chelsea thrived in Little Rock. She had a tree house, a cat named Socks;
she played soccer and studied ballet. She skipped third grade. At four
years old, asked what gift she would like to give to her mother, she
replied, “Life insurance.” “This tiny child wanted me to live
forever,” explained Hillary, affectionately.

Chelsea also took an early interest in the stock market. She liked to
play cards, at which she was said to be devilishly good. “She tried to
cheat, but her parents wouldn’t let her,” says a photographer who took
the family’s picture at the Governor’s Mansion in 1992. Chelsea went to
public school in Arkansas, which also proved favorable to her father’s
political image.

Bill always said that he made a point of having breakfast with Chelsea
every day, but as he became more consumed by the demands of his career,
he had difficulty finding time to spend with her. David Maraniss writes
of how Clinton was crushed to find that Chelsea wasn’t terribly upset to
learn he couldn’t accompany her and her mother on a planned family trip
in 1987 because he had decided to run for president. “Well,” Chelsea
said, “then Mom and I will go without you.”

This anecdote was later played out in the press as a symbol of Chelsea’s
maturity. But her father found it troubling enough to cause him to delay
his presidential run by four years. “I need some family time,” he said
in a statement (he was also battling the first reports of his
extramarital dalliances).

When he finally did make his announcement, outside Little Rock’s Old
State House, in 1991, Chelsea held back tears. She was 11.

‘As a child, as a teenager, there were ways in which she reminded me of
her father,” says a former adviser to the president. “She was very
unself-conscious, friendly, physically affectionate, quick to give
people a hug. Very open to the world.”

“She reminds me of a combination of the two,” says Donna Shalala.
“Bright, attractive, articulate, very comfortable in her own skin. She
gravitated more towards history and political science.”

“[She] has her mother’s character and her father’s energy,” Bill
Clinton told The New York Times in 2001.

Not much has been written about Chelsea’s White House years, largely
because of her parents’ strenuous efforts to shield her. When the
Clintons moved into the White House, the “family pool” of rotating
reporters was reduced from 14 to 8. “They made it clear she was
off-limits,” says the former adviser. Even Chelsea’s body language was
off-limits. Even comments she made about what she had had for dinner
were ordered off the record (like her dad, she liked fried chicken),
with the unofficial threat that wayward reporters could be denied access
to the president. “Everybody knew what it was,” the former adviser
says. “And the press agreed, O.K., we will leave her alone.”

The Clintons had the painful experience of Amy Carter to guide them.
Amy—nine years old when she moved into the White House in 1977—was
mercilessly examined and often ridiculed by the media, the most
tasteless example being a report in The Washington Star calling
attention to her “beginning of a bosom, a hint of a waist.”

When Bill was elected in 1992, there was fear that Chelsea—who, at 12,
was going through what was described as an “awkward stage”—would
meet with the same sort of treatment. Fear became panic when right-wing
commentator Rush Limbaugh took his digs at the First Couple by going
after their child, referring to her as “the White House dog.” Saturday
Night Live also did a skit in which Chelsea, played by geek specialist
Julia Sweeney, was compared unfavorably with the Ralph Lauren-ish Gore
girls. Hillary was said to be furious, and she laid down the law, as far
as coverage.

“I really find it hilarious when they make fun of me,” Bill said in a
post-election interview in People magazine. “But I think you gotta be
pretty insensitive to make fun of an adolescent child.”

But it seemed that the Clintons had a double standard when it came to
Chelsea. “They did brilliantly deploy Chelsea when they needed to,”
says historian Gil Troy. When the news broke, during Bill’s 1992
presidential campaign, of his relationship with Little Rock lounge
singer Gennifer Flowers, Chelsea suddenly appeared as counterweight to
her parents’ seemingly rocky marriage. Bill and Hillary went on 60
Minutes to talk about how they had dealt with the affair; afterward, the
press was told that Chelsea had watched the broadcast with her mother
and father and had remarked, “I think I’m glad that you’re my
parents.”

But some of Hillary’s comments on the show—“I’m not sitting here like
some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette”—hadn’t
helped the Clintons’ image as a cold yuppie couple. Soon after, they
appeared with Chelsea in a cozy family portrait on the cover of People.
It was the eve of the Democratic convention. “There’s no question they
benefited from those People-magazine pictures,” says Howard Kurtz.
“There were people who didn’t even know they had a child.”

“What I would like America to know about my parents is that they’re
great people and they’re great parents,” Chelsea said in the Linda
Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason-produced campaign video that was
shown at the convention. But as her parents walked triumphantly up
Pennsylvania Avenue on the day of Bill’s inauguration, Chelsea was
nowhere in sight. She rode alone in the limousine. She didn’t get out.

The Sidwell Friends School, where Chelsea matriculated as an
eighth-grader in 1993, was a far cry from Little Rock’s Forest Park
Elementary School. At that time, Sidwell had three athletic fields,
eight tennis courts, and two gymnasiums, and cost $10,400 a year.

A photo taken at the time shows Chelsea, her famous curly top blowing
about her face, being inspected by three lithe young Sidwell girls
literally reaching out to touch her. Over her years at the school,
Chelsea would come to resemble some of her more high-maintenance
classmates. By her final year at Sidwell, Chelsea had become practically
waiflike. “She had these little pin arms,” says a Washington society
hostess. “It was the whole overachiever, ballet-student thing.” Bill
Clinton seemed to be addressing a whole culture of women’s negative body
images when he delivered the commencement address to Chelsea’s
graduating class in 1997. He cited feminist author Deborah Tannen in
exhorting the class not to be “put down” by the “culture of
critique.”

The president concluded his speech with an anecdote about his own
eighth-grade science teacher, Vernon Dokey, who, “to put it charitably,
was a very physically unattractive man. . . . He told us that every
morning when he woke up he went to the bathroom and . . . looked at
himself in the mirror and he said, ‘Vernon, you’re beautiful.’ Well,
class of ‘97, you’re beautiful.”

Chelsea had had a successful career at Sidwell, where she was known as a
brain. She played goalie on the soccer team. After school, she went for
snacks at Roy Rogers (she is, however, a vegetarian) and shopped at the
Gap, trailed discreetly by Secret Service men. She had a gaggle of
girlfriends, whom she often invited for sleepovers at the White House.
When they watched movies in the screening room, Chelsea was responsible
for sweeping up the popcorn.

Such details of her life were known only because the White House allowed
them to be. Reports that came out while her father was in office
portrayed Chelsea as almost saintly: “Chelsea has been exposed to the
less picturesque side of life: the ravages of the war in Bosnia and
Kosovo, earthquake ruins in Turkey, and abandoned babies in Mother
Teresa’s orphanage,” said Ladies’ Home Journal (sounding a lot like the
Talk piece Chelsea would later write).

Even the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Chelsea is intensely serious, keenly
intelligent, socially conscious, self-assured, people-oriented. . . .
Although she attended an elite private high school . . . she involved
herself extensively in volunteer work in Washington.”

By the time of her father’s second inaugural, Chelsea had started to
develop her own following. She’d had her first makeover—her hair
smoothed and styled, her outfits now classically monochromatic—and was
even put on Mr. Blackwell’s best-dressed list along with her future
fashion-show seatmate Gwyneth Paltrow.

In 1997, Chelsea made the walk up Pennsylvania Avenue beside her
parents, waving to cheering crowds. Her 17th-birthday celebration, in
New York—where she got a “Happy Birthday” chorus from the cast of
Rent—was her media coming-out party. A NEW MORNING FOR CHELSEA, gushed
Newsday, in one of the many articles to note how the president’s
daughter had “blossomed.” It didn’t all seem so different, in a way,
from the Amy Carter scrutiny, although put more kindly.

On a trip to Africa with her mother, just a few weeks later, Chelsea
surprised reporters by making her first spontaneous public statements
ever. In front of a group of African teens in Arusha, Tanzania, she
spoke out about violence and drugs among American youth. “There is a
lot of hopelessness,” she said.

When a teenage girl asked how the United States was handling these
concerns, Chelsea said, “I think . . . that [the solution]
ultimately has to come from the young people themselves. I think that’s
something we have to work on. We’ve got to realize we are the future . .
. and ultimately we have to do it for ourselves.”

Hillary Clinton stood by, nodding.

The year Chelsea entered Stanford, her father’s popularity was at an
all-time high. Her parents—excepting a Whitewater investigation that
was by then losing steam—were relatively free from scandal.

The Clintons had wanted Chelsea to attend college somewhere closer to
home; they had counted on Georgetown, Bill’s alma mater. When Chelsea
left for Stanford, Hillary Clinton reportedly experienced an agonizing
bout of empty-nest syndrome. “It was an extraordinarily difficult
time,” says Lisa Caputo, a former spokeswoman for the First Lady. Bill
had helped Chelsea pack.

As if to somehow compensate for the loss of their daughter, the Clintons
had taken extreme security measures for Chelsea at Stanford. There was
bulletproof glass in her dorm room, Secret Service agents living next
door, cameras in the halls.

Two hundred and fifty journalists covered the Clintons’ tearful farewell
to Chelsea on the day they left her at school. And then after that there
was the inevitable silence. The university had a strict policy of not
commenting to the media about Chelsea, and students followed suit. A
student on the Stanford Daily, Jesse Oxfeld, was fired from the paper
after refusing to withdraw a piece that questioned the Daily’s very
policy of not covering her.

Chelsea seemed to love Stanford. With her Secret Service agents, dressed
like students, trying to keep up with her on mountain bikes, she zoomed
through the streets of Palo Alto, once crashing her bike.

Saying she wanted to become a pediatric cardiologist, Chelsea considered
a pre-med major; she later declared history, writing a 150-page thesis
on the 1998 Irish peace process that quoted from personal interviews
with President Bill Clinton. (She got an A.)

She took swing dancing. Reportedly, a photograph of her with skirt
flying up as she did a cartwheel circulated around the university at one
time, but it never appeared elsewhere. Students seemed to take Chelsea’s
privacy as seriously as her parents did.

Life at college was as normal as possible for Chelsea—except for the
occasional, conspicuous segue back into First Daughterdom, like her
18th-birthday party at Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Utah ski retreat. And then
there were her boyfriends, all of whom seemed to have a
ready-for-90210-ish quality. The first was Matthew Pierce, a religion
major and buff star of the Stanford swim team; Chelsea took him to
church services when her parents came for a visit in early 1998, and
Bill posed for a picture with the boy, affably draping an arm around
him.

But Bill was perhaps less relaxed about the whole idea of Chelsea’s
being away at college, dating, than the image seemed to suggest. Another
young man who happened to go out with Chelsea while she was at Stanford
says that, prior to their one and only date, he actually heard from the
president. Bill contacted the young man via E-mail, asking him to
refrain from saying anything to the media about his (uneventful) evening
with Chelsea. The young man agreed, even offering to sign something. But
the president said that would not be necessary. “Bill doesn’t like
documentation,” the young man explained.

Like the rest of America, Chelsea learned from the media that her father
had been having a relationship (or, in Bill’s version, not having a
relationship) with a 22-year-old White House intern named Monica
Lewinsky. It was January of 1998, during Chelsea’s second semester at
Stanford. In addition to the many other issues the administration
suddenly had to deal with in the new scandal, there was the thorny
question of Chelsea. How was it all affecting Chelsea? “No one, however
he feels about the president,” intoned The Washington Post, “can
forget that he is also the father of a teenage girl who adores him.”

The White House issued reports of Chelsea’s strength and well-being.
“She’s fine,” said Marsha Berry, a spokeswoman for the First Lady.
Jesse Jackson was called to the White House to attend a Super Bowl
party, after which he prayed with Chelsea and Hillary (who are
Methodists; Bill is a Baptist).

Jackson’s Newsweek account of the prayer session is classic Chelsea
spin. “Chelsea is both tough-minded and tender-hearted,” Jackson
wrote. “She has said, ‘I love my dad. I understand. I can cope.’ ”

The People-magazine cover story on Chelsea that appeared in February
1998 told essentially the same story, that of a noble girl who “has
kept her head high.” But the Clintons were said to be so angry about
the piece that they “went to the highest levels of Time Warner” to
appeal for it to be killed, according to a former White House adviser.
“It was not a good day” when the story broke, says Lisa Caputo.

The Clintons issued a joint statement—their first in
years—condemning the story, again on the grounds that the media had no
right to invade their daughter’s privacy; but there was a rumor at the
time, probably spread by Republican Party operatives, that the White
House actually welcomed the positive coverage. “They had plausible
deniability,” says Lucienne Goldberg, the anti-Clinton power broker.

As the Lewinsky debacle spun out of control, so did White House control
over media coverage of Chelsea. In November of 1998, Chelsea appeared on
the cover of the New York Post with the headline CHELSEA’S
HEARTACHE—ROMANCE ENDS FOR ‘STRESSED’ FIRST DAUGHTER. The tabloid
reported that Chelsea had turned up at Stanford’s medical center
“complaining of shortness of breath and clutching her forehead.” “I
wouldn’t consider the New York Post part of the media,” White House
spokesman Joe Lockhart responded.

It was reported elsewhere, however, that Chelsea had been treated for
“stomach problems.” The Post suggested that Chelsea had been overcome
with stress because of her recent breakup with Matthew Pierce, who
allegedly couldn’t take the problems that went along with having a
girlfriend whose father was facing impeachment. “[Chelsea] just
kept saying, ‘I’m not adjusting well,’ over and over,” said the paper.

But on August 18, 1998, the day after her father’s grand-jury testimony
in the Lewinsky affair, Chelsea made what became the central gesture of
her tenure as First Daughter. As her father and mother made their somber
walk from the White House to a helicopter waiting to take them to
Martha’s Vineyard for a much-needed vacation, Chelsea, walking between
them, grabbed their hands. She was seen as literally holding her parents
together, the bridge that made them, whatever happened, a family.

The moment has been taken up as an example of her parents’ seemingly
cynical use of Chelsea in what conservative columnist George Will called
“the grotesque pantomime of domesticity that the Clintons perform in
public.” But Chelsea’s own political instincts were by now too
sophisticated for that alone to satisfy as an explanation.

When the helicopter alighted on Martha’s Vineyard that day, Chelsea
lingered unusually long before the cameras. She smiled, chatting easily
with well-wishers as her parents stood in the background, muted by
scandal.

“The Monica thing hurt her relationship with Bill a lot,” says a
friend of the family’s.

Both Bill’s and Hillary’s positions in the world had changed
dramatically by the time Chelsea entered Oxford, in October of 2001, as
a graduate student in international relations. Bill was no longer
president. For the first time in his life, he had become intent on
making money, traveling the world and delivering speeches—one almost
every other day—at up to $300,000 a shot.

Meanwhile, Hillary, who had always been intensely focused on Chelsea,
was now preoccupied with learning the ropes of being the junior senator
from New York. Hillary was enjoying a kind of midlife liberation,
finally free from the shadow of her husband and the constrictions of her
former ceremonial office. She and Bill were no longer living together,
strictly speaking. (When not travelling, he spends most nights at home
in Chappaqua, New York, and she in Washington, although they say they
meet for dinner three to four times a week.)

Then September 11 came. It was a scary time in the world, and in its
aftermath Chelsea was in a place where very little was familiar to her.
“When [Chelsea] first got here,” says an Oxford student, “she
wore sunglasses—no one in Oxford wears sunglasses—and hats pulled
down over her ears like she was a celebrity hiding out from the press,
but no one noticed.”

Far from her parents, released from the fanfare that had followed her
most of her life, and finding it hard to find friends among her British
classmates, Chelsea was miserable. Ensconced in the same lodgings in
Oxford’s University College where her father had reportedly lived as a
Rhodes scholar (between 1968 and 1970), she began to write her Talk
piece. She had been at Oxford only a couple of weeks.

It’s hard to be abroad right now, not only because of the inescapable
sense of dislocation but also because of the protectiveness,
defensiveness, and pride I feel for my country. Every day at some
point I encounter some sort of anti-American feeling. Sometimes it’s
from other students, sometimes it’s from a newspaper columnist,
sometimes it’s from “peace” demonstrators only a few blocks from where
I live. Many question whether the evidence pointing to Osama bin Laden
is accurate and conclusive. Others wonder whether America has any
genuine concern for the plight of the Afghan people. I bristle at
these suggestions.

It was strange to hear this characterization of British sentiment when
Prime Minister Tony Blair was on the news nearly every day pledging his
support, and British troops, to the American war effort. The British
press reeled at Chelsea’s comments; as international relations go, it
was a disaster. “Turn down the volume,” advised The Times of London.

Oxford students, for their part, were bewildered by what they saw as a
misreading of what it had been like at the university in the weeks after
the September attacks. “We thought the Talk piece was rather
peculiar,” says Marcus Edwards, former editor of Cherwell, a student
newspaper. “There were people, not just Americans, who were very
supportive of the war. [The protests] were a vocal minority.”

“[The Talk piece] was a bit much, a bit showy,” says Igor
Toronyi-Lalic, a member of the Oxford Union, a debating society. “The
general reaction [on campus] was not hugely anti-American. There was
a debate going on, but it was very somber. There were a lot of arguments
about what should happen . . . but that is as it should be at a
university.”

“People thought she was speaking rubbish,” says Mark Hodgkinson, a
former Cherwell editor who did campus reporting for London papers on
Chelsea’s article. “I must have talked to 100 people, and I didn’t find
one person who agreed with her.”

Still, Chelsea found her way to an anti-war demonstration that took
place in November at the medieval city’s town hall. As a Labour M.P.,
Jeremy Corbyn, spoke, a group of American boys unfurled a large American
flag. Chelsea was with them. “Remember the September dead!” one of
them screamed. They were asked to leave.

One of the boys was Ian Klaus. It must have been a heady moment for the
beginning of a romance. “Oxford is the capital of romance,” Oscar
Wilde, an alum, once said.

The town of Oxford gives every impression of being fully swept up in
globalization; Cornmarket and High Streets—the main student
drags—offer a Gap and two Starbucks within a block of one another. All
around, however, there are the looming spires of the college, reminding
students that for the better part of 1,100 years the place has churned
out thinkers, prime ministers, and Kings. A 10-foot-high portrait of
Henry VIII, who founded Christ Church College, glares down at students
in its dazzlingly august dining hall (where scenes from Harry Potter
were filmed).

So there wasn’t much of a chance, when Chelsea Clinton came to Oxford,
that her presence there was going to impress anyone, or at least not
that anyone would let on. This was made abundantly clear one afternoon
at the King’s Arms, a snug bar with a rowing theme in the center of
town.

There was a telltale pink pashmina thrown carelessly on the floor; the
girls were Sloanes. The boys were nursing hangovers, having spent the
night before at a party where someone had set a bamboo chair on fire;
it’s chic to be louche, among a certain set at Oxford. (“Everyone hates
them,” says one undergraduate about that crowd. “They’re quite
stupid,” says another.)

The group was drinking Bloody Marys. Over the course of an hour-long
free-for-all, they offered their thoughts on Chelsea Clinton and
Americans in general:

“Not to be rude at all,” said Erik Hannikainen, 22, “but here,
Chelsea’s just an American. She doesn’t realize that. We have Percys and
Howards—people whose families came over with the Conqueror, really.
The whole of English society. O.K., she’s a president’s daughter—brilliant.”

“He’s not president anymore,” Sophie said.

“And compared to people like the Duke of Northampton,” said Erik.

“Or even an Astor,” said Sophie.

Their friend Jake Astor was sitting nearby. I asked him whether he still
had family in Manhattan. He laughed. “We own Manhattan,” he said.

“It’s not like, You’re American, we’re not going to talk to you,” said
Sophie. “It’s like, You’re American—but you have to slightly have the
right attitude. . . . It was all over the Sunday papers Chelsea hates
us.”

“[The Talk piece] was fairly ill-advised,” Erik said.

“She’s a very nice girl, an incredibly nice girl,” said another girl,
Mouse Allen, 20. “I met her at a party. . . . I really liked her.”

“She’s been doing a lot of snogging lately,” said Jake, using the
British slang for kissing.

“I think probably it’s rather a trophy thing, wouldn’t you think?”
said Erik.

“It may or may not be. That’s so harsh,” said Sophie.

“I mean, good Lord,” said Erik.

They regaled me with a bit of Oxford slang:

“M.P.S.I.A.: ‘Minor public school, I’m afraid.’ ”

“N.Q.O.C.D.: ‘Not quite our class, darling.’ ”

They laughed.

“I’ve got a very good American joke,” said Mouse. “What’s the
difference between an American and a pot of yogurt? After a hundred
years, the pot of yogurt will grow culture!”

They roared.

They continued:

“H.K.L.P.: ‘Holds knife like pen.’ ”

“N.F.I.: ‘Not fucking invited.’ ”

They said that Chelsea never showed up at their sort of party—at
Oxford eating clubs and debutante affairs in London—which they
couldn’t understand because, after all, “she would be invited,” Sophie
admitted. On the other hand, none of them had partied with Puff Daddy in
New York, as Chelsea did recently.

‘It’s a Henry James story,” says Audrey Li, an American graduate
student in religious studies. “Chelsea came here and had to confront
her own Americanness. Everyone is miserable when they first get here.
Suddenly, you don’t know who you are.”

“When Chelsea wrote she was miserable in Talk, I was like, Join the
club,” says Madhavi Nevader, an American graduate student of the Old
Testament. “When you first get here, for six months you don’t have
anybody—and then something happens, and you have a social life.”

For Chelsea, the “something” happened at a get-together of American
Rhodes scholars who found themselves clinging to one another in the
weeks after September 11. His name was Ian Klaus; add a touch of James
Spader and he looked like her father.

Ian cut an impressive figure: At Washington University, in St. Louis, he
had been the recipient of numerous awards, including one for an essay on
homophobia in African-American literature. He had a commitment to public
service, having organized on campus a group called Bears and Cubs that
encouraged student athletes to become involved in tutoring young people
from low-income neighborhoods in St. Louis. His father, Robin Klaus, a
California fitness-equipment tycoon, was a prominent Republican; his
mother, Patricia, owned a horse-breeding farm. Immediately on entering
Oxford, where he is studying English literature, Ian was signed up to
play for “the Blues,” the school’s varsity soccer team.

“He has ridiculous, floppy hair,” says an Oxford boy.

Despite his good looks and stunning record as an undergraduate, Ian,
like Chelsea, seemed to have some trouble winning over his British
classmates. His own Americanness took the form of a certain national
swagger very unpopular at the university.

“He’s a really loud character,” says an undergraduate. “Very
self-aware, shouting around in the sandwich shop like he rules the
world.”

He also lost points for his wardrobe, which tended toward conspicuous
designer labels. “He wears Prada sports shoes,” clucks another Oxford
boy.

“He did seem a touch arrogant—but in fairness, he’s entitled to be,”
says one of Klaus’s soccer teammates. “He’s a very good footballer. He
works really hard, he runs around a lot. The other thing is he always
helps you out, he always shouts to you, ‘I’m here, I’m here!’ He’ll run
so that you can pass to him if you’re in trouble.

“But he does try and run the show a bit—he tries to be, like,
quarterback. He tries to be the main man all the time.”

Ian’s American alpha-maleness proved popular with the ladies. “A lot of
girls said he seemed like a very all-American guy. He’s quite muscular,
you know,” says the team-mate. “People who do his subject say, ‘This
guy is, like, very, very intelligent.’ He’s quite intellectual.”

Chelsea has an estimated six or seven bodyguards living in Oxford.
Presidents’ children usually lose their Secret Service detail once their
parents leave the White House; terrorism is said to be the reason for
Chelsea’s continued protection. (A Secret Service spokesman contacted
for this story would say only that Chelsea has “Secret Service—type”
protection.)

At the London premiere of The Shipping News, in March, Miramax chairman
Harvey Weinstein marveled to the crowd about Chelsea’s level of
protection. “So I’m warning you,” he told Ian Klaus. Then Weinstein
led Chelsea around the after-party as he would a star.

Of late, Chelsea’s bodyguards’ job has involved watching, or perhaps
trying not to watch, Chelsea’s blossoming romance. Chelsea and Ian have
been seen kissing in the Quod, a stylish restaurant in the center of
town, in Merton’s Bar, a favorite ale stop of Sloanes, and at “Code
Red,” a weekly party at the Bridge, a nightclub.

“She stands there snogging her boyfriend surrounded by her two
bodyguards. The whole thing just looks absolutely ridiculous,” says
student reporter Mark Hodgkinson.

“They were getting down to it in a sink” at a house party on Cowley
Road, where many students live in private residences, says an Oxford
undergraduate. “Someone opened the bathroom door. They had clothes on.
They were snogging. Her bodyguards were standing under a streetlamp
outside, and someone was going to call the police, saying, ‘Who are
these dodgy guys?’ ”

But if the displays of affection strike certain classmates as excessive,
the romance seems like the real thing, most students agree. “They had
their hands all over each other,” says a student who saw Chelsea and
Ian at Oxford’s Garden of Eden Ball. “She seemed quite happy around
him. She was dancing, screaming quite loudly with joy.”

“I’m very happy . . . and really, I am so grateful to be at Oxford,”
Chelsea said at a charity benefit in London in November. “People have
been coming up to me and saying ‘I hear you’re really unhappy here’ and
it’s not true at all.” It was the same month her Talk piece was on the
news-stands, but it was as if she had never written it.

“I’m so incredibly happy,” Chelsea told the London Mirror.
“[Ian’s] the nicest guy ever. He makes me laugh all the time.”

According to people who have been around them, what Chelsea and Ian
mostly do is talk about politics. The basis of their attraction seems to
be very similar to what brought Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham
together, three decades earlier: political passion, social commitment,
and ambition.

It was a birthday party for an Oxford graduate student at Du Liban, a
Lebanese restaurant in Oxford. The graduate student was a black man in
his 30s from Peckham, London’s equivalent of Harlem. He had saved the
seat next to him for Chelsea Clinton. She and Ian Klaus were late. When
they finally came in, a ripple went through the group of about 60
people.

“It must have been hard for him,” says someone who was there, seated
next to Ian. “He had to deal with this succession of good-looking,
charismatic Rhodes scholars and other people coming over to talk to
Chelsea. He was visibly put out and competitive. He was sawing his food.
He was the overprotective boyfriend, constantly touching her, marking
her.

“[He said], ‘So what degree are you going for?,’ and I told him my
degree, and he said, ‘What are you going to do with that?’ When I
mentioned the name of the impressive bank I was going to, he suddenly
became much more interested in me. But it was this constant tussle of
wanting to talk to me and wanting to check on Chelsea. One moment of
tension was when our host said, ‘Perhaps people would like to swap
places.’ Ian changed places with reluctance. Then Chelsea was full-on
next to me—she was full-on. I thought, She’s either quite keen or
she’s just someone who really makes it a point of looking you in the
eye. There’s a rumor she’s political in the extreme and she’s this great
operator.”

“She has a better grasp of the way the world functions than most
graduate students in the world,” says P. J. Crowley.

One day in Oxford, I went to a café called Georgina’s, where I’d been
told Chelsea and Ian hang out. There they were. Chelsea was dressed all
in black and had her hair tied back in a ponytail. She had on large
glasses with square, black frames. She looked serious, preoccupied by
something. Ian Klaus was sitting beside her. The two of them looked so
much like pictures of Bill and Hillary in their Yale Law School days it
seemed almost impossible.

I sat down. I was waiting for a photographer from Vanity Fair to arrive
so that he could talk to Chelsea. Ian never took his hands off her. He
touched her hair, her face, stroked her shoulder, her leg. Chelsea was
not reciprocating that morning, and Ian squirmed in his seat.

Harry Benson, the photographer, arrived and sat down. He wasn’t sure
what Chelsea was going to say, because her mother’s office was against
her doing a story just now. To Harry’s surprise, and relief, Chelsea
agreed to pose for him. It was 12:30; she said she would meet him at 2.
“If you tell Hillary, she’ll tell you not to do it,” Harry said in his
Scottish accent.

“I’m a big girl now,” Chelsea said, laughing.

Chelsea and Ian left the café and walked back to Chelsea’s college. As
they went down the street, Ian had his arm clutched around Chelsea’s
waist; it fluttered up to her hair, her neck, down to her back. He
looked around a few times, in a protective way, or as if to see if
anyone was watching. He was wearing purple-tinted sunglasses.

A little after two, Chelsea came out of University College to meet
Harry. She had changed her clothes. She was now wearing a smart, blue
jacket that looked like the kind of thing you would wear to a State of
the Union address. She had put on makeup, especially around the eyes. It
had the careful look of someone who has been watching makeup artists.
Two bodyguards followed behind as we walked along, and their guns bulged
from their backs (there had been controversy, when Chelsea came to
Oxford, over whether they would be allowed to carry them).

Harry wanted to pose Chelsea by the elegant Christ Church College or in
the Oxford meadows. But Chelsea said she would like to be photographed
outside a library. She carried a large bag of books.

Some tourists from Spain—a group of three young women and a
man—passed by and started saying in Spanish, “There goes Chelsea
Clinton.” They got very excited and chased after her; Chelsea stopped
and offered to pose for a picture with them. One of the girls ran away
waving the camera like a trophy, screaming, “Chelsea Cleen-tone!”

Behind the Bodleian Library, the most famous library at Oxford (and
favorite study hall of the Sloanes), Chelsea posed for Harry. When the
camera was on her, her face was transformed. She tilted her chin up into
the light; her eyes went expectant and blank. It was a naïve face. When
she’s relaxed, her expression is canny and intelligent. She posed for
about half an hour.

“I need to go read,” Chelsea finally told Harry.

I asked her if she would answer a few questions.

She sighed. “You’ve been told,” she said, “by my mother’s office,
that I can’t talk to you.”

I said people wanted to know about her.

“Yes,” she said, “I grew up with everybody . . .”

I asked her if she planned on going into politics.

She wavered a moment.

But she begged off.

“I’m just trying to be a student,” she said. And with that, she went
into the library.